It’s 2022 – your website must have an engaging and responsive layout for all screens. Even though you can always develop a responsive layout by coding your own CSS rules, there are ways to save development time and costs – by using CSS frameworks. Two of the most popular CSS frameworks are Tailwind CSS and Bootstrap. But is one better than another?
Bootstrap
It was created by Twitter’s designer and developer and became one of the most popular front-end frameworks and open-source projects in the world. Bootstrap was created in 2010 but released on August 19, 2011.
Over the years, it had over 20 releases, and by version 3 it became responsive by default with a mobile-first approach. The latest version at the time of writing is Bootstrap 5.
Tailwind CSS
Tailwind CSS is an open-source CSS framework released on May 13, 2019(the alpha version was released in late 2017). It is relatively new compared to Bootstrap, but Tailwind CSS took a different approach to CSS frameworks. It is a “utility-first” framework, which does not provide any predefined classes for elements.
Key difference
The main difference is that Tailwind CSS, unlike Bootstrap, does not provide predefined classes for elements, i.e. buttons, tables etc. Instead, it creates a list of “utility” classes than can style each element by mixing and matching.
This means to create a great-looking button on Bootstrap you would need to write additional CSS on top of importing Bootstrap and setting predefined button classes(optionally). In theory, this would make your website a bit slower as it has to load more resources.
On the other hand, creating the same great-looking button on Tailwind CSS would only take adding classes in your HTML file. On top of that, Tailwind “builds” your CSS file by only importing classes that you actually used. This means you rarely need to write any custom CSS while developing with the Tailwind CSS framework.
In conclusion, Bootstrap always loads its full framework, and you need to write additional CSS, while Tailwind CSS only imports the classes your website uses and you almost never need additional CSS. This makes Tailwind CSS faster to work with, saving work time for developers and more lightweight – improving the performance of the website.
Conclusion
I heard about the Tailwind CSS release sometime in 2020, but I was hesitant about it. At the time, I was developing websites using Bootstrap’s framework and was happy with it. However, seeing so much great reviews about Tailwind CSS, I tried it almost a year later, and it changed my approach to CSS frameworks.
Tailwind CSS is AWESOME. I develop custom-looking elements and components faster, rarely switching between HTML and CSS and my applications/websites are lighter in size. On top of that, Tailwind CSS introduced an easy approach to styling light and dark modes – you can check it out at one of my projects – Gemologija.lt.
Looking for a light and dark mode website optimized for performance, best practices, accessibility and SEO? Contact me – I would love to help!